Fallouts Emmy nominee read the script 250 times and screened westerns in the makeup chair.
Keeping pace with Hollywoods perpetual awards horserace.
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Walton Goggins has had leading roles before.
His role as The Ghoul inFallout(and his preapocalypse identity as Cooper Howard) combines all of it.
Hes the bad dude and the hero at the same time.
He has been transformed into something unrecognizable, and yet its animmediately recognizable Goggins performance.
And I said, Hey, you know what?
Maybe I should read those scripts.
And I read them and was just so taken with it.
How did you became involved with this show?
And two minutes into the conversation, I said, Im in.
They said, Well, dont you want to know who youre playing?
I said, Its irrelevant.
Well, dont you want to read a script?
And I said, Hey, you know what?
Maybe I should read those scripts.
And I read them and was just so taken with it, really in the first 30 minutes.
There are two characters that you play, different versions of the same person.
He is a 1950s western-movie star.
So I really wanted to understand who his contemporaries were.
What jobs did he lose out on?
What jobs did he get?
He wasnt escaping or running away from anything.
And he did it, and hes just the kind of guy who you want to hang out with.
And he said, Yeah, okay.
How much does that pay?
Yeah, it pays a lot better than riding a horse.
And he was good at it.
And then he got another job and another job and lo and behold, then he has a career.
I dont look at it as backstory, because then thats a step removed from the process.
And I just skip all of those steps.
My teacher, and the way he talked about this process is its a childs game.
You hold up a mirror to nature and you turn yourself over to an imaginary set of circumstances.
Its really that simple, and its that complicated, right?
Because your ego really has to get out of the way.
Thats where I got it from.
And then your imagination just goes wild.
It could be anything.
Thats really my jumping-off point.
And I do that with everything.
So, you knowevery momentof Boyd Crowders childhood also?You know, I do.
Maybe not every moment.
Some of those moments, no one wants to know about.
I know a lot of them.
But you are playing this character at two very different moments in his life.
Does that process change when youre approaching these different elements?
It would be great if it was a play.
And what that life was really like for Cooper Howard.
And then building from there.
Whenever you say, on paper,Oh, hes been alive for 200 years.
Thats hard to wrap your head around.
Its like, okay, well, really?Hashe been alive for 200 years?
I dont think about it in those terms.
Its like, lets break down these 200 years.
What does that really look like?
Day one: What happened in the moment after the bomb dropped?
Did he wake up five days later?
Did he get up immediately?
Is his daughter alive?
What was it like the first day he had to kill someone for those very things?
And the disintegration of a true morality what is your true north?
And the disintegration of everything he knew.
He comes from a moral into an amoral existence.
I mean, its different becoming a woman than it is becoming an irradiated ghoul.
I couldnt stand to look at myself in the mirror.
I had to cover the mirror.
So, it was a mind-set.
Im a person who likes to move, and this required being still for a long period of time.
So we just watched movies every morning.
He was so cool, you know?
And I thought, okay, well, thats something I can work with.
And then, you know, watchingButch Cassidyagain and seeing what a rascal Paul Newman is.
I mean, its Paul Newman.
And I thought,Oh, well, thats an interesting balance between those two worlds.
It was between those two that I felt like,yeah, this makes sense to me.
You work a lot withElla Purnell.I do.
We didnt really rehearse anything beyond one scene that we read before we started.
And Ella has her process.
Her process is different than mine.
But I knew we would find our way, and she was such a joy to work with.
You couldnt start from two points on a map that are that polar opposite, right?
So, we didnt really talk about it.
Every day and every scene just kind of happened organically.
